Stop the Summer Steal

Enough! My god, enough!

When you’re a kid, summer is everything. After 180 days of school, it’s a completely inalienable paradise with only one rule: be home when the street lights come on. When you get a little older, you have a summer job. When you get to college, it’s license to backslide into your lazy teens. But all those versions of summer are still blank canvases. Even when you’re an adult and there is no actual break, there’s still that lingering sense of freedom — even if you’re on a W2.

You can’t buy that kind of feeling. But, you can brand it. And it seems now that there is always a race to “own” summer, an inherently unownable thing.

Hot town summer in the city.

It started innocently enough when the Summer of 2018 was branded “The Summer of Scam.” That was when its heroine and folk hero, Anna Delvey, made headlines for her wildly ambitious-almost-successful grifting. It was also the summer of Theranos conwoman Elizabeth Holmes’ fall from grace, Caroline Calloway, the twilight of the Fyre Festival fallout, and the start of fake-kidnap-victim Sherri Papini’s unraveling. None of these individuals sought to name or brand the summer this way, but the public and the media naturally grouped them all together and that’s how it happened. It’s not unlike how the Summer of 1967 became the “Summer of Love.”

In 2019, things shifted a bit when Megan Thee Stallion dropped her album Fever and coined the phrase “Hot Girl Summer.” I’m sure you remember, because it was everywhere. Hot Girl Summer at its core makes so much sense when we think about what summer was when we were younger. You can do what you want, you’re probably carefree enough to express yourself how you like, and you generally are living on your own terms. It was fun and it ran its course, though you’ll still see it referenced pretty often. On the outside, it didn’t feel like a planned thing. It happened, as memes do, on its own. Unpredictable and uncontrollable.

When these things inevitably hit a fever pitch, somebody somewhere thinks they can harness it. They’ll wonder, “what’s our ‘hot girl summer’?” That’s probably their job, so you can’t blame them. But the second you try to reverse engineer these things is the second they become absolute trash. I’m sure somebody at, like, Hellmann’s Mayo was thinking about how to make it “BIG MAYO SUMMER” (or probably Cinco de Mayonnaise). Hot Girl Summer also gave birth to Christian Girl Autumn, which became its own juggernaut thanks to its founding mother Caitlin Covington. The internet now eagerly awaits when she announces that fall has begun.

Of course, the summer of 2020 was … different. We were in COVID lockdown and things were weird. These summers saw the rise of “Hot Girl Walks,” which felt like an ancestor of Hot Girl Summer, but didn’t have the same sort of mass adoption. There were some people who claimed 2021 was “Hot Vax Summer,” but like, come on. Get it together.

Before we get to Brat Summer, we have to address Greta Gerwig’s 2024 Barbie movie. One morning we all woke up and everything was pink — Barbie pink. This was all thanks to the gargantuan marketing efforts and collaborations behind the film. A lot of these were planned far in advance, but once it started, every brand was looking for something to pink to promote. A color, a cultural phenomenon, and a blockbuster hit is a recipe for mass adoption. Interesting.

Then it was 2024. Brat Summer. And while one can’t say this was a fully engineered campaign, the powers that be certainly knew how to fan the flames. And they gave the public enough material to make it happen by creating a very distinct universe around the album: the eye-popping (bleeding) green, the typeface, an unapologetic front woman, Kelley Heyer’s Apple Dance, and the rest of it. Like Barbie the year before, it was suddenly green as far as the eye can see. Charli XCX’s tour is ongoing and ends in August 2025. We’re in the midst of Brat Summer 2.0, though it feels far less potent than it did before.

None of these summers were bad. But what’s painfully obvious is that they become more and more mechanical as time goes on. It feels as though we’re always going to be haunted by somebody trying to claim summer for — ugh, a brand. It happens on smaller scales ad nauseam with people and companies posting about what kind of summer “we’re” having or what “we’re” doing. We’re only a few short years away from a Clean Colon Summer sponsored by Miralax. Is nothing sacred?

There are so few places left where a brand can’t scream at you or get at you. I wish they’d just leave summer alone.

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